Poor Kids Find A Rich Friend

Irving Harris, An 86-year-old Mogul Who Made His Millions With Toni Home Permanents, Devotes His Sizable Fortune--and Brain Power--to Helping Children Born Into Poverty.

September 22, 1996|By Sabrina L. Miller, Tribune Staff Writer.

For 40 years, Irving Harris has had a love affair with the brain.

He's fascinated with the cells and neurons of it. He organizes brain conferences and, for easy reference, keeps old magazine articles about it on the cluttered desk of his fourth-floor Loop office.

Harris, 86, a multimillionaire businessman who made his fortune from the Toni Home Permanent, has used this curiosity--and a considerable amount of his wealth--to help the weakest and most vulnerable among us: poor children.

And though his name is cemented in the city's social and financial circles, the average Chicagoan may be more familiar with the names of the programs he has created.

The Erikson Institute in the 1960s, for example, was formed to train teachers in early childhood development. In the 1970s, it was Family Focus Inc., helping parents improve their knowledge of early child development.

In the '80s and '90s his Ounce of Prevention Fund and Beethoven Project carried on the effort. Ounce of Prevention works at reducing the number of teen pregnancies, and the Beethoven Project is an intervention program for children born in the Chicago Housing Authority's Robert Taylor Homes.

Now, after all these years of giving speeches, sitting on commissions studying children and devouring every bit of information on the subject he could, Harris has written his first book, "Children in Jeopardy: Can We Break the Cycle of Poverty?" which was released earlier this month.

The book is filled with the alarming statistics and bleak studies that lead Harris to conclude: "Children truly are the future of our nation. We owe to them, and to our nation, to ensure that all children are born with the best possible chance to live, love, grow, and excel."

Friends say Harris' love for children plus his teeming knowledge in the area of early child development makes him unique among philanthropists.

"He is really authentic. He is a rare combination of skills and knowledge," said Dr. Donald Cohen, director of the Yale Child Study Center, an institution to which Harris has donated more than $11 million.

He also understands that development starts when the child is barely out of the womb. By the time a child is 2 years old, he insists, the child knows what the world expects of him or her.

Though he made his fortune in women's cosmetics, book publishing and investments through good, old American capitalism, he concludes that poverty is a manmade problem. Its victims are women and children.

"I think if we can figure out a system that creates the poverty, then some effort might be put toward figuring out a system that prevents it," he said.

Consider Irving Harris part of the radical rich. He's an 86-year-old feminist, an old-guard liberal who is pragmatically pro-abortion rights and pro-social activism.

"For one thing, we make a great mistake in our society by forcing poor women to have babies they say they don't want," he said, watery blue eyes blazing. "It's vicious of our society to tell them, `By God, you had the sexual activity, you have the baby, you live with it.' "

For all his radical social leanings, family members insist that Harris can be really conservative.

"Up until just recently, he was always driving this old Buick, when, clearly he could have afforded better," said Danny Meyer, New York restaurateur and Harris' grandson.

Since Harris is from the unforgiving business world, his calling as a champion for people so unlike himself might seem unusual. But for reasons he can't fully explain, he insists on sharing his abundance.

By the time Harris reached the magic number, age 2, he understood that the world expected him to be nothing less than utterly successful.

He was born wealthy in St. Paul, the oldest of three children. His father, Bill, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, made his fortune selling woolens to tailors. Bill Harris had only a 6th-grade education but he expected his two sons, Irving and Neison to become successful businessmen. They didn't disappoint. Their younger sister, June, still lives in St. Paul.

"My father had implicit confidence that I would be successful," Irving Harris remembers. "I was expected to be competent."

Following Ivy League educations at Yale (from which Harris graduated Phi Beta Kappa), the Harris brothers made their fortune hawking the Toni Home Permanent. The cold wave revolutionized women's hair care in the early 1940s, when Neison Harris and a friend started the company. Big brother Irving was the vice president of the Century Metalcraft Corp. in Los Angeles but Neison persuaded him to join the company.

"We were brought up to be leaders. Our parents told us that we should be No. 1 in our class, and we were," said Neison Harris.

Irving was the mastermind behind the scenes, putting together effective radio advertising campaigns and penning the famous slogan, "Which twin has the Toni?" The Harris brothers made major headlines when the Gillette company bought Toni for nearly $12 million in 1948, the same year Irving Harris moved to Chicago.